§83. Aesthetic Experience
Dewey elucidates the value of experience with a distinction between growth and mere subsistence. We are to imagine subsistence as bare life, while growth is the stepwise movement from a temporary falling out to a more extensive recovery.
This movement, the experience from which we learn, unfolds in waves. First, a phase of need, the organism momentarily falling out of step, then improvised recovery. With that we do not simply return to the earlier state, for instead we are changed, enriched for the invention expressed in resistance surmounted. Dewey seems to have read little Nietzsche and liked none of it, but for both of them whatever does not kill you makes you stronger. Perhaps they learned it from Emerson. Any resistance or tension is an opportunity for discovery of unsuspected potential and for the experience from which we learn.7Dewey has an idea of how experience ought to unfold, the norm of its development, which he finds in nature, in evolution, in naturally selected adaptation, the norm belonging to life, not to culture or ideology. Experience is a process involving many interpenetrating elements—sensations, memories, percepts, and affects—and tends by immanent finality to a qualitative closure. Although everyday life is beset with distraction, discrepancy, and miscalculation, we enjoy consummated experience when action runs its course, with nothing broken off or intermittent, everything rounded out, the end having the quality of a fruition rather than a halt. On such occasions we enjoy an experience, the kind we remember and learn from, but more, the kind we live for, the aesthetic, satisfying, culminant kind.
A normatively consummated experience is emotional, that is, unified; intellectual, that is, meaningful; and practical, that is, an adaptive interaction with an environment. Nor is consummation reserved to the end, being anticipated throughout and recurrently savored in innumerable small consummations, always presenting something new.
In virtue of its satisfying quality Dewey describes such experience as aesthetic. Aesthetic enjoyment is the quality attending the immanent finality of experience, “the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience.” Aesthetic consummation is “experience in its integrity... pure experience... experience freed from the forces that impede and confuse its development as experience.” It is to this aesthetic experience that “the philosopher must go to understand what experience is.”8Dewey attributes philosophy’s failure to achieve all he thinks it can to a “lack of confidence in the directive powers that inhere in experience.” Philosophers tend to understand experience as solitary states of subjective feeling. But sense data and simple ideas are reflective products of retrospective analysis, and not a description of the given. Experience is primarily the experience of things, of nature, of the real, not of sense data or impressions, and penetrating nature in a way inquiry exploits. Dewey and Carnap agree on the value of de-subjectification, which is indispensable to scientific success. Dewey says “the de-personalizing and de-socializing of some objects” is “a necessary precondition of ability to regulate experience.” While Carnap’s pursuit of de-subjectification took flight from experience into pure structure (§66), Dewey’s idea is to put experience under the control of experimental logic and aesthetic feeling. Carnap has practically nothing to say about the value of experiments in science, but Dewey cannot say enough. He repeats a signature theme of empiricism, with which he is more consistent than the logical empiricists were. To know a thing takes experience with it and its circumstances and is not to be had by thinking alone, nor by perception alone, without memory, that is, without experience.9
To understand what experience is Dewey sends philosophers to aesthetic experience.
Later, he says that imaginative experience “exemplifies more fully than any other kind of experience what experience itself is in its very movement and structure,” thus implicitly equating the aesthetic, consumma- tory quality of experience with its imaginative quality. He smiles at Kant's facultative psychology, and assures us that imagination is not one of those mythic powers. Experience is imaginative when action is notably successful in stitching old and new. “When old and familiar things are made new in experience, there is imagination.” Imagination exploits unexpected, unobvious continuity in a way that is both inventive and aesthetically consummatory. “There is always some measure of adventure in the meeting of mind and universe, and this adventure is, in its measure, imagination.”10Perceptions are not given, they are instead elicited in response to a problem. They are probes, interacting with the environment, a response of the organism to change, and thus a relay between environment and organism, and not an inner show for contemplative consciousness. Dewey advances the evidence of enjoyment and suffering to prove that nature makes no objection to finality. Consummation is a natural tendency, the natural way for action to develop, an immanent finality that requires neither social convention nor divine teleology. “If experienced things are valid evidence, then nature in having qualities within itself has what in the literal sense must be called ends, terminals, arrests, enclosures.” These fund the empirical meaning of “good.” Philosophers do not have to fly to the transcendent. The finalities that dignify life are natural and occur in nature.11